Stupid Comics

For someone who only had two appearances, Yankee Girl surpassed her meager run to being one of the most identified good girls in comics. The superheroine first appeared in Dynamic Comics issue 23 from IW Publications in 1947, the series itself was an imprint from Canada's Superior Publishers. She didn't show up again until 1964 in Danger Comics issue 16 from Super Comics which was also an imprint of Comic Media and drawn by Miss Masque artist Ralph Mayo in the 50s but didn't see daylight until a decade later. There was a character labeled Yankee Girl that came out before this from 1941, but she was really an adventurer named Kitty Kelly who sometimes wore a superhero-themed outfit. The genuine Yankee Girl was Lauren Mason, a socialite who had the ability to gain superpowers whenever she said the phrase Yankee Doodle Dandy. How she gained these powers, which included super-strength, flight, and durability, is never revealed, although it's obvious to see that they copied ...

Hey kids, wanna relive the fun times of the American Civil War? Then, boy howdy, do the fine folks at Josely Co. have a deal for you! Aside from being one of the darkest chapters in our nation's history, somebody thought that glamorizing the horrors of the Civil War in cheap toys intended for children was a great idea. Josely Co. ran comic ads for this since the 60s, and their kit came with 150 soldiers for each side that were blue and grey along with cannons, ships, and wagons that were all flat cutouts, so essentially, you're just buying a set of plastic-molded paper dolls that crack to pieces just by looking at them. For the time, A dollar and half doesn't seem like too much, but considering its over sixteen smackers nowadays, that's more than too much for some 2D garbage. Whether it was a coincidence that Josely chose 150 soldiers for this was inspired by the Combahee River Raid where Harriet Tubman help Col. James Montgomery and lead 150 soldiers against the South ...

The Eastern Color Printing Company began as one of the founding publishers of comic books including Famous Funnies. One of their few one-shots was Conquest in 1955 which did short bios of historical figures, one of which was the fabled Beowulf in a story drawn by Bill Ely, although here they stuck with the supposedly trendier name of Beowolf The Mighty. The opening narration mockingly states that Beowolf was even stronger than the superheroes of time, although Beowulf probably couldn't sneeze an entire galaxy to dust like Superman. The story gives him a short intro of being a brave warrior, and gets called to Denmark by King Hrothgar to tangle with a particularly nasty monster called Grendel, although for this adaptation of the legend Grendel is a freaking dinosaur. Whether its a T-Rex or an Allosaurus that managed to survive the Ice Age isn't told since there weren't any eggheads from Jurassic Park around at the time, Grendel is obviously a ravaging reptile instead of a lu...

Famed Sheena artist Bob Powell used the pseudonym Gregory Torey when he created the character of Landor, Maker Of Monsters. It was originally intended be just a filler in the first issue of Harvey Publications' Speed Comics but went on to have it be a regular feature in the first 11 issues, although each one was short around 4-pages long. Landor was one of the first genuine supervillains to get his own segment in a major comics anthology and not a regular foil for a reoccurring costumed hero. Landor is a generic mad scientist who creates a new monster for each issue, and lather, rinse, repeat. Some have seen him as a ripoff of Dr. Frankenstein, but he evolved into being a hideously deformed figure after surviving a fire and now sporting wearing a reaper robe. Most of Landor's experiments were foiled by the generic adventurer duo of Anthony Torrence and his perpetually single fiance Marcia, occasionally with Anthony's old school chum Kung Fu-Tse who was also a criminal exper...

As hypocritic as the Comics Code Authority was when it was first established in Oct. 1954, there was a series of comics that was actually titled Approved Comics. The strange thing is that it ceased publications just a few months before the Comics Code went into effect which was set up to cater to the panic that moral monarchs like Dr. Fredrick Wertham set up in the early 50s with his book Seduction Of The Innocent preaching that youth were being corrupted by horror and crime comics that went outside the accepted standards and would only allow approved comics to be circulated. Leading up to this was an imprint of Ziff-Davis Publishing called Approved Comics that started in 1950 which included titles like Crime Clinic, Weird Thrillers, Tops In Adventure, and the original Cloak And Dagger. Eventually, Ziff-Davis sold several of their titles to St. John Publications which were simply labeled Approved Comics, even though it wasn't titled that. Within the span of six months from Mar.-Aug...

Pickwick Books strikes again! After WWII they plastered dozens of issues with this 2-in-1 ad for two totally different lines. One of which was for self-taught language books including Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Polish with Pickwick claiming this would be the best way to plan a postwar campaign whether it would be for business or pleasure. Considering that they used a picture grab of a leggy samba dancer would indicate Pickwick intended this to sell more to lonely former soldiers, especially when it boasts that Spanish is only good for romance and opportunity, although you might want to dedicate more than just 10 minutes a day to it for a foreign language to sink in. The ad also boasts that it will offer a set of books to learn numerous fighting styles, one of which is plain old "scientific" boxing, while the others are for "police" wrestling and "police" jiu-jitsu. Now how police wrestling and jiu-jitsu are different from whatever type they were...

Supergirl creator Otto Binder got his inspiration for Superman's cousin from one of his earlier creations, Mary Marvel. Similar to She-Ra, she was the long-lost twin sister of an already established male hero, could transform into her super mode by saying the magic words, and had been considered to be the strongest mortal girl in each of their stories. Mary Marvel was Mary Bromfield after she was adopted by rich parents and was really Billy Batson's sister who she reunites with after revealing his secret identity as Captain Marvel. Mary says the word "Shazam" and becomes the first female member of the Marvel Family, and is revealed she could harness the powers of six mythical heroines whereas Capt. Marvel got his from six other heroes, the acronym for which spelled out Shazam. One of Mary's superpowers that were different from her brother was they replaced the courage of the Greek hero Achiles with the beauty of the Roman goddess of the dawn Aurora. Now, beauty is...

St. John Publications had plenty of original titles, but they did do reprints of existing characters from former comics publishers. Some of these were renamed like Lucky Coyne into Jinx Jordon, or Master Key into Rod Holmes, one however was extremely bizarre and that was the Blue Monk. Originally, the character was a short man conveniently named Shorty Wilson who was a former football player who led a crusade against crime fairly reminiscent of The Shadow but under the name of Black Dwarf in 1944 from Chesler Comics. Now how a person of his stature was able to get away with keeping a secret identity is a big question, especially since his outfit didn't cover his face at all, so unless there was a large population of short persons in his city then Black Dwarf didn't have a big crowd to hide in. Cut ahead to 1948, and St. John gave the Black Dwarf a fresh paint job and called him the Blue Monk, even though he was still a diminutive character. Originally, Black Dwarf had his own i...

Atlas/Seaboard founder Martin Goodman built his company to get back at his former company of Marvel Comics to create his own line of comics. Some of these were slightly original like The Cougar, Planet Of The Vampires, and Ironjaw. Other Atlas titles were blatant knockoffs of Marvel characters such as The Brute who was the Atlas version of Hulk, Wulf The Barbarian borrowing from Conan, and Hands Of The Dragon copied Master Of Kung Fu. Two other Atlas comics began as their own creation, but both of them eventually caved into the Marvel formula despite their limited run. One was John Targitt who was a secret agent that already had a mask and spandex duds and in the last issue of his run decides to go with the moniker of Man-Stalker after dealing with the villainous Prof. Death. The other Atlas character who got Marvelized was The Scorpion whose first two issues were written and drawn by Howard Chaykin and took place in the early 20th Century where a daring pilot named Moro Frost used the...

Sometimes thought of as the first comics superheroine, Fantomah was beaten out by the Magician From Mars by a few months when she premiered in the second issue of Fiction House's Jungle Comics in 1940. Fantomah was created by Fletcher Hanks, although he used the pen name Barclay Flagg while making her, and she was not your common jungle girl stereotype, or at least in the beginning. One of Hanks' other creations was Stardust the Space Wizard who could pretty much do anything the plot needed for him to do. Fantomah was equally overpowered as she was referred to as "Mystery Woman Of The Jungle", and not in a female Tarzan kind of way but more of a modern-day living goddess which the opening narration for nearly every episode claimed she was the most remarkable woman ever known. Fantomah appears to be a hot blonde in a revealing black negligee which is unusual as far as jungle girl attire is usually just a roadkill bikini, but when she needs to get aggressive Fantomah tu...

One comic book ad that struck fear in the hearts of male readers everywhere was by Ward Laboratories, Inc. During the 1950s, they ran a series of advertisements that told you to "save your hair" with one of them looking like something right out of horror movie. Ward had done ads before that did a close-up hair-destroying germs, but this particular one had a huge monstrous hand reaching through the several microscopic shots and reaching for a poor middle-aged man's head who appears to be scared out of his skull. The real sting here is the lightning bolts striking the man's top saying that the mere touch of this germ-infested zombie hand would cause head odors, dandruff, and scalp itch, as if this would happen in real life. The chances of you coming across an undead appendage in the wild with the sole purpose of giving you fallen hair are pretty thin. The fact that these ads were made up for a kid's publication but were aimed at older men is confounding as if the ad...

Most everyone has seen the We Can Do It poster of Rosie the Riveter, but two years before J. Howard Miller did that famous painting, the comic book character Pat Patriot probably served as the idea prototype. Lev Gleason Publications started the story in the pages of Issue #2 of the original Daredevil comics in 1941 created by the combined talents of Charles Biro and Bob Wood who both popularized the genre of crime comics. Unlike most superheroines of the time, Patricia Patrios wasn't a bored debutante who fought crime but a genuine working girl starting off on a military assembly line that moonlighted as an actress playing a female Uncle Sam (or Aunt Sam) wearing an American flag outfit. One night after a performance while she was still in costume, she stops a plot by her factory boss who was selling airplane parts to the Axis powers. From this point on, she was given the professional name of Pat Patriot and gets into one scrape after the other as both a government mascot and spok...

Dean Ross Piano Studios had been printing their advance course booklets for a while in the 40s, but when the 50s crawled along they really amped up their game by using comics to brainwash youngsters into thinking that learning to play piano is the only thing that can save you from a life of social exile. These comic ads promoted their ever so special patented Automatic Chord Selector which was really just a cut-out piece of paper that acts as a finger guide for anyone wanting to tickle the ivories. For some reason, nearly every other middle-class home had a piano taking up an immense amount of space during the mid-20th Century, probably because there wasn't much on TV at the time, so pianos were the nexus of all get-togethers. Dean Ross devised a deceptive ploy in their ad's short comic about a girl named Mary fretting herself into near catatonic state just because her friend Betty is now an irresistible man-magnet only due to the meager skills she learned from Dean Ross. At lu...

In 1953, the craze of 3D comics had publishers thinking that this was going to be the next evolution in comics, but it turned out to be just a passing fad. However, Harvey Comics decided to create the first stereoscopic superhero, Captain 3D, and they called in comic book royalty to work on it. Captain America creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon handled the story, with Kirby doing all the art along with Mort Meskin and Steve Ditko in his first ever professional superhero comic. The comic came with two pairs of 3D glasses, but this trend didn't pan out so Harvey only did a single issue. Captain 3D had one of the gaudiest superhero uniforms ever made outside of Canada's Polka-Dot Pirate with his striped leggings, red buccaneer boots, dorky helmet and with a big "3D" emblem over the chest, he seemed more like a corporate mascot than a legit hero. The idea behind the character was to have a superhero who could literally leap off the page into the real world, although only i...

Do you want to get World War 3 with ants? Because this is how you get it! Youthful Magazines' Captain Science had a few stand-alone sci-fi tales during its 7-issue run, one of which is more of an alien invasion than an actual world war. Starting out in 1952, an explosion in Earth's atmosphere has ants raining down onto the planet who all grew to giant size after eating. Soon the entire globe is infested with colossal creepy crawlers, and entomologist Prof. Tom Leigh realizes the imminent danger, so he gathers a co-ed group of scientists to seal themselves in a university lab and try to find a solution to the ant-mageddon. The his/hers crew realize they don't have enough supplies to last before they can find a resolution to the big bugs, so one of them creates a plastic formula that embalms anyone into suspended animation, so they spend the next several decades sealed away with only two scientists at a time working on the ultimate ant eliminator. Cut ahead to 2052 and Tom is...

Joe Weider was a bodybuilder from Canada who started the International Federation Of Body Builders with his brother Ben, and founded the Mr. Universe contest, not to mention he got hitched to Betty Brosmer who was a pinup girl with the nearly impossible proportions of 38-18-36. He also published several magazines like Flex, Shape, and Men's Fitness, although his major claim to fame was his infamous comic book ads that ran all the way from the Golden Age up into modern times. One of the latter ads got Weider into trouble because he roped a young Arnold Schwarzenegger into being the poster boy for his faulty Weider Formula supplements which didn't produce the results it boasted about. Another ad has a scrawny boy asking his muscular friend Rocky about how to attract bikini girls on the beach simply by getting the Weider training booklet. However, one of the most offensive ones boasted that anyone who followed his flag would turn into a raging psychopath wanting to pick fights wit...

George Brenner created some loser superheroes like 711, Destiny, and Just'n'Right, not to mention the laughable villain Brick Bat, but he did make the original super mecha Bozo The Robot, plus the very first comic book costumed superhero known as The Clock, so you have to take the bad with the good. One such bad character was shafted into The Clock's adventures was the boyish Little Orphan Annie wannabe, Butch. The Clock himself was Brian O'Brien, your average rich socialite who fought crime in his secret identity which is just a fine gentlemen's outfit with a black mask draped over his face. This might sound like dozens of other superheroes like Batman, but The Clock was the original character to use this motif in comics, bridging the gap between pulp fiction and comic book heroes. The Clock did have a partner nicknamed Pug who oddly enough looked similar to O'Brien, which would've been helpful if The Clock ever needed a stand-in to publicly pose as his civ...

For anyone who thought superheroes wore only flamboyant costumes that showed off way more skin than they should have, then they would have used Captain Truth as their poster child. Coming out in 1945, Cambridge House Publishers did about three one-shot mixed bag anthologies, one of which was Gold Medal Comics debuting the exuberant musketeer wannabe in his own single story. Ken Elliot is a teenage orphan who instead of becoming a millionaire's youthful ward lives in poverty, but at sometime in his life he gained the powers of flight, bullet immunity, and super senses, although how he got these extraordinary talents is a big mystery as there was no enchanted ring or magical lightning involved. Ken dawns an outfit with a cavalier hat complete with a feather, plus matching red trunks, boots, and gloves that fully exposes his chest and legs, while getting a little more comfort from a canary yellow cape. In his only ever tale calling himself Captain Truth, the boisterous boy hero flies ...

Aside from Charles Atlas, another bodybuilder persona that had a series of comic book advertisements was Mike Marvel. Now, whether or not Mike was related to any of the 8.5 Captain Marvels is up in the air, but he managed to have ever-changing ads in comics from the 1950s-70s. Mike was selling his book on what was only specialized stretches for just 10 minutes every day using his patented Dynaflex method. He claims that you can do this no weights at all or even any exercise, although stretching is itself a form of exercise. His book on isometrics says that when you're finished his course you could rip whole phone books apart, which doesn't do much good nowadays, plus the book largely exaggerates some of the superhuman feats you can accomplish simply by Mike's stretching techniques. The comic ad has details and testimonials that are shrunk down so small to the point you need a microscope to actually read it, but it makes a point to show that you can gets these life-changing ...

Comic books have been a source for promoting everything from politicians, sports, shoes, groceries, cooking, metals, and various other subjects, but during the 50s, the Helme Tobacco Company tried to coax kids into enjoying their glorious snuff products. Snuff-Man was the title given to this 16-page advertisement printed by cartoonist Vic Herman's studio, and it was also the nickname given to snuff salesman George who begins a long conversation with two boys, one of which is Leroy, the younger brother of a George's date Junie was picking up at home. Leroy asks why his sister calles him Snuff-Man as if he was a D-List superhero in a bad parody magazine, so George waxes on about the story of snuff and how it was practically the backbone of human civilization all thanks to Columbus' little boat trip. A ton of laughs are to be had into this revisionist history of snuff, including how weed has medicinal value, how the crown heads of Europe were able to make objective decisions a...